


Let Silence Talk to Itself

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, Social Network (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-16
Updated: 2011-09-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:13:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eduardo says nothing, because they're only the half-human children of the gods, and what are those worth? Greek heroes are what the universe uses to pick its teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let Silence Talk to Itself

**Author's Note:**

> Knowledge of both The Social Network and Percy Jackson is recommended prior to reading this fic, as it contains all the characters. ALL OF THEM. EVERY LAST ONE.
> 
> If you've at least met May Castellan in PJO canon, you're good.
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/104872.html).
> 
> (AND. The layout got screwed up when I crossposted from LJ, and I am not going through individually to fix it, so. SORRY.)

-

❀❀❀

It's the middle of May, when most of the cabins are still half-empty because not all schools get out for the summer at the same time, and the snow hasn't quite all melted off yet. It clings to the dark sides of the high-altitude cliffs in low, grey, gritty piles, even as the weather grows warm. Eduardo finally and gratefully leaves his jacket in his trunk, wearing just his long-sleeved shirts outside, and one day, at dinner, Divya Narendra gets claimed by his father and leaves the Hermes table for good.

"Hum-dah, hurrah," says Mr. D from the head table, waving a wine glass filled with fizzing Diet Coke in his usual dystopian manner, when the buzz of excitement dies down and the fire-red emblem fades from above Divya's head. "Like nobody saw that coming."

" _I_ didn't," Dustin protests from Eduardo's left, but too quietly to be heard.

"Congratulations, young Mr. Narendra," says Chiron at large, with considerable more warmth. He gestures, his eyes kindly. "I do think this means a change of seating arrangements, don't you?"

Divya nods, holding onto his plate of food with two hands, his eyes too wide for his nonchalance to be readily believable. With a quick sideways glance at the Hermes table, the closest to good-bye he gets, he crosses to the other side of the dining hall and shoulders himself between the bulk of two big Ares boys. They eyeball him, considering, and Divya lifts his chin at them, daring.

Two tables down, Cameron and Tyler put their heads together, talking hurriedly and low, their hands tapping in front of them like they're doing sums. Tyler looks agitated, and Eduardo can't see Cameron's face from this angle.

The other campers had all sorts of bets on who Divya's Olympian parent was -- placing bets on who was going to claim the unclaimed campers is pretty much an unofficial Olympic sport; Eduardo feels that, at this point, he wouldn't be surprised if the Olympians themselves did it. The betting pool is full of all kinds of things (get-out-of-chores free cards, stable privileges, even the occasional gold drachma from the few who have change to spare) and Eduardo drags a French fry through the ketchup on his plate, glancing around the dining hall and wondering who won and who lost this time. It's not difficult math.

At the Ares table, Divya snaps out something too quick for Eduardo to catch, his tone defensively sarcastic, and the whole table erupts into laughter, booming and approving.

"I thought he was a son of Nemesis for sure," mutters Dustin. He sounds a little put-out. 

Across from him, Chris looks equally nonplussed. "My bet was on Athena," he goes. And, "What?", when Dustin and Eduardo both shoot him curious looks. "I just think it would have been nice for him, if he turned out to be brothers with Cam and Tyler."

"Athena never lets a child of hers go unclaimed," Eduardo points out.

"True," Chris allows, shrugging in a way that sets the new muscles in his shoulders shifting under his shirt. Chris is one of the few people that can go home for the school year and come back even _more_ tan than he was before he left. One of the benefits of living below the 33º, he supposes.

Divya glances over his shoulder, catching Eduardo's eye through the bodies of other campers. He smiles, a slow drag of his mouth up one side of his face, proud and still a little rueful.

❀❀❀

Eduardo remembers the first time they talked about it, bundled up together with mugs of hot cocoa cradled in their red-knuckled hands. A snowstorm had buried the cabins up to the eaves in cold, white snowfall, and since there were only about twelve year-rounders at that time, Chiron sent the satyrs around to collect them, so they could all gather in the dining hall, where there would be a warm fire and even warmer drinks.

"I think I had a mother," Divya says to him, so soft it can only be a confession. "At least, I think I remember a mother. I'm not sure."

They are the only ones still awake, except for the harpy standing sentry at the door and the soot-and-cinders girl tending to the hearth, with her downcast eyes and tangled hair. Eduardo doesn't know her name, and he doesn't know if he's allowed to ask. They are ten years old, the both of them, and it feels dangerous and new, staying up this late.

If Divya's right and he had a mortal mother, then that rules out goddesses like Demeter and Aphrodite as his Olympian parent. They run through the other ones, keeping their voices down even though the likelihood of being heard over the snoring satyrs is minimal at best ("Hermes," is first because that's the cabin they're staying in, "Apollo," "Hephaestus," "do I look like a son of Hephaestus to you?" "Umm, I don't know, it could happen." "I guess. Ares," "Dionysus," "Eww. Maybe Athena," "Really? That's weird." "No, it isn't. KC has a mortal mom, and she's in the Athena cabin, remember? Athena just dates smart people, I think, boys and girls,") but none of them trigger any of Divya's memories.

"I guess I won't ever know. I was just a baby," he says quietly. His eyes look strangely deep in the firelight when he lifts them to Eduardo. "What about you?"

"I don't remember anything," says Eduardo, and shrugs.

❀❀❀

About a week and a half later, Mark's mother drives him up from Long Island. Eduardo is up in the hills, practicing longbow with the tree nymphs, when he sees their little red Saab snaking its way past the strawberry fields, its windows rolled down because it's a nice day, late spring and breezy.

He bows to the nymphs and goes skittering back down the trail, loose rocks sliding underfoot and threatening to trip him. By the time he reaches the Big House, still carrying the longbow and out of breath, he sees Mark tilting up to kiss his mother good-bye at the boundary line. His sour-faced little brother hangs back by the car, scuffing at the dirt with the toe of his shoe. The paint job is dull, old, chipping around the bumpers and rusting from the tire wells. Mark hauls his trunk up the hill, and behind him, his mother pushes her curly hair out of her face, waving.

Eduardo greets him with a smile, his tongue tripping over the news about Divya.

"Well, yeah," Mark shrugs, his voice flat and unfriendly. Eduardo doesn't mind: Mark is always this caustic at the start of summer, after a whole year of dealing with kids who pick on him at school, his scatterbrained mother, and his nightmare behavioral problem of a brother. Eduardo thinks he wouldn't mind having any of that, but he also thinks he might change his mind if he actually _had_ Mark's life. "Didn't I call that? I'm pretty sure I called that when he threw that hammer through the window of Hephaestus because they cheated Hermes out of our win."

"You did call it," Eduardo returns, grinning. He'd forgotten about the hammer -- Divya's bad temper hadn't really been his defining characteristic up until now. "Everyone else thought he was too runty to be a son of Ares. Cameron and Tyler are pissed; you and KC from Athena cleared out the betting pool."

Mark smiles thinly, and Eduardo sees the triumphant flash in his eyes before he looks away, out towards Camp. Part of him would be annoyed that Mark hasn't even been here five minutes and he's already exempt from most chores, but in reality, he's just glad to see him. It gets boring when the summertime campers aren't here.

This year, Eduardo is fourteen, which means Mark has just turned thirteen. 

He thinks he gained an inch or so of height since last year, but standing next to Mark, he isn't so sure. He feels exactly the same.

Later that night, their sleeping bags pressed so close together on the dirty cabin floor that he can feel Mark's body heat, he asks, "Will you miss him? Divya, I mean."

"No," says Mark without hesitation. There's moonlight on his face, making his eyelashes appear longer than they really are. They both picked this spot to roll out their sleeping bags because it's right underneath the window, and sometimes a breeze will come through, bringing with it the smell of clean air and oil from the lantern swinging from the hook outside. When full, the Hermes cabin is so cramped for space that nobody questions this arrangement.

Eduardo smiles. Above them, swinging slowly in his hammock, Dustin snuffles in his sleep, and mumbles something that might be words, an evocation in ancient Greek. Eduardo wonders whose powers he is calling on in his dreams -- their dreams are never just dreams, after all.

"You're just glad we've gotten rid of him," he accuses, without heat.

"Yeah," Mark agrees readily. "I would get all of you out, if I could."

It sounds mean, but Eduardo smiles, shuffling one leg out of the zipper to kick at Mark's. He knows what Mark is trying to say.

"Me too," he says, and Mark rolls his eyes at the tone of his voice, turning over so he doesn't have to look at Eduardo's face, and settles in to sleep.

❀❀❀

Mark and Dustin are brothers the way all cabinmates are brothers -- not by blood, because by some strange mythological twist, the gods of Olympus don't have the same genetic material as everyone else (which Eduardo figures is the polite reason for excusing the way they marry their siblings and cousins and uncles and then sneak around with _other_ siblings and cousins and uncles, and so when campers take other campers to the 4th of July fireworks show, nobody points out that everybody is technically everybody else's cousin) so they're not really _related_ to each other, but rather by their characteristics.

Even those are as varied as the rest of the Hermes cabin; Dustin is flighty, twitchy, too boisterous, and got caught trying to boost a red Mustang right off the curb in front of a Great Western Bank as early as eleven, before he was even able to see over the steering wheel. Mark is more patient, a tinker and a trickster; the only thing of Hermes he really seems to have inherited is the small, smug curl he gets to his lips when he's gotten away with something, sure as winking.

It turns out they'd been born only a month apart, because Hermes isn't exactly a role model for fidelity among his mortal women.

"Is that why you call him by his name?" Chris asks at one point. He lifts a hand up to one of the pegasi, sugar cube nestled in the flat of his palm, but the pegasus just snuffles at his hair instead, like that's the better treat. "And not, like, Father or Dad or anything like that?"

Like Eduardo, Chris sleeps in the Hermes cabin because he's still technically unclaimed, even though everybody knows he's a son of Aphrodite. For one thing, his mortal father told him as much before he came to Camp, and for another, his blonde hair and blue eyes are so similar to that of his siblings' that sometimes, when he's passing their table, Mr. D will double-take and ask him, droll, "Chad, why are you sitting here? Your table's over there."

But Aphrodite thinks boys are kind of useless, so she hasn't officially claimed Chris as her own yet, and until she does, he's not allowed to move to the Aphrodite cabin, which is why he stays with Dustin, Mark, and Eduardo in Hermes.

"I'll call him Father when he does something to deserve the name," Mark replies, crouched low on the steps to the hayloft. He and the pegasus he's supposed to be brushing down are mutually ignoring each other. Realizing that the only way the work is going to be done is if he does it himself, Eduardo entices it over, rubbing at its soft muzzle in reward when it comes. Its wings shift along its back, feathers rustling with delight, and it nickers at him, pressing into the touch.

Mark's little brother is also a son of Hermes, but he's too young to start attracting monsters, and someone needs to stay home and take care of their mother during the summer.

It won't last forever, though, and Eduardo wonders what it will be like, having a younger version of Mark around.

Dustin calls Hermes "Dad" willingly enough, but Dustin just has lower expectations of people in general, the gods included.

❀❀❀

Don't get the wrong idea. Most of the time, Eduardo doesn't give much thought to being unclaimed -- it honestly doesn't have a lot of bearing on his day-to-day existence, and he's in good company. Along with the more popular persona of being the winged messenger god, Hermes is the patron of all wandering travelers, so the light on front porch of his cabin is always lit, a beacon to those who have nowhere else to go. They welcomed Eduardo into their fold when he first came to Camp, adopting him as one of their own, and nothing much has really changed since then.

It still doesn't stop the betting pool from doing its thing.

"It would honestly be a lot easier if you had any distinguishing characteristics at all, Earnesto," Mr. D says cheerfully at lunch, clapping Eduardo on the back as he shuffles his way up to his usual place at the high table, which pretty much confirms Eduardo's theory that Dionysus participates in the betting pool just as often as the campers do.

"Don't listen to him, man." Dustin slides across the bench, his plate heaped high with food and string cheese dangling from the corner of his mouth. "I would be honored to call you my brother."

"Thanks, Dustin," says Eduardo, knocking their elbows together in acknowledgement. "Although if Hermes was really my father, wouldn't he have claimed me at the same time he claimed you and Mark?"

Dustin shrugs. "Unless he forgot," he goes.

The thing is, that is not actually outside the realm of possibility. They catch each other's eye and start laughing, unable to help it. It's not really funny, because this is their _family,_ and it's never funny to be the child whose father completely forgot he had, but they laugh anyway, because maybe it is a little funny.

When he brings it up with the Winklevoss twins, they exchange a long look he can't interpret. 

While they're conversing in their silent twin way, he takes their calculator from them, fiddling with the settings. Texas Instruments, the newest model; sometimes Eduardo forgets that the Winklevosses' father is actually a fairly affluent man, out in the human world. He wonders if it helps them survive the school year.

Cameron shrugs. "Personally?" he goes. "Dionysus has always treated you like one of his own."

Eduardo snorts so hard at that, he feels it in his sinuses. "Seriously? I'm a year-rounder. Outside of Chiron, Mr. D is practically the only authority figure I know. Besides, he calls me Earnesto."

"He's got the first and last letter right," Tyler points out. "That's better than he does for most of us."

"He's still confused as to why he sees double every time he looks at us," Cameron gestures between himself and his brother. "I don't think he's realized that we're _actually_ twins."

Eduardo just shakes his head. "I'm a year-rounder," he says again, because this is the important part. "If I was his son, he's had four years to claim me. If he's my Olympian parent, and he's waited this long, I'm not sure I _want_ him to claim me." Nobody's ever quite explained to them how Olympian genetics works; looking at all the daughters of Aphrodite, there's something about the way they walk, and the cookie-cutter shape of their bodies, that makes it obvious they're related: even though they come in all different colors, they're from the same mold. So while, okay, if you tilt your head and squint like you're on a rocking boat, Eduardo _does_ look a little like Dionysus, with his dark hair and thick eyebrows, that doesn't actually mean anything. Mark and Dustin are half-brothers, and they're built about as similar as night and day.

He hands the calculator back to them. "There," he goes. "I programmed it for endless scrolling -- it should make your diagrams easier."

This earns him a surprised blink from both of them. Then Tyler snatches the calculator up, thumbing at the buttons to test Eduardo's claim.

"Are you sure you're not actually one of us?" Cameron narrows his eyes; they are as grey as the surface of the lake during rainfall. "A son of Athena?"

Eduardo sighs. The problem, he thinks, about being unclaimed, is that you can never claim any of your achievements for yourself: somebody will always, always try to attribute it to a possible parent, like there's no way you could accomplish it by yourself.

❀❀❀

"You know, at first, I just assumed you were another useless son of Aphrodite," says Christy, the head of the Hephaestus cabin, with an offhanded shrug. Then she cups his face in her hands, startling him with her proximity. "But then you got all pimply when you hit adolescence, and there's no way Aphrodite would have let that happen, so that rules her out."

"Thanks," Eduardo draws out, sarcastic. "That's so kind of you."

When she releases him, grinning, her palms leave streaks of soot on his cheeks. "Because I'm so known for my kindness," she goes, with a coquettish little hike of her shoulders, so exaggeratedly flirtatious that it makes him roll his eyes. At fifteen, Christy looks too young to be cabin leader, especially since she has an older brother who is taller, beefier, and arguably more patient, but Eduardo wants to see _anyone_ try to tell Christy she can't have what she wants.

"Still," he goes, passing her a canteen of water, watching the way the sunlight catches on her earrings; a cartilidge-climbing latticework of scrap metal she made herself. She keeps her hair tucked up underneath a scarf, which might have been sunshine-yellow at some point, but has since been greyed with smoke from the billows. "I'm trying to decide if I should be disturbed that you thought I was descended from a sex goddess while I was just a child."

She chokes.

Eduardo counts a victory.

Her eyes are dark, the color of coal, but they are sparkling bright like beetle shells when she spins on him, indignant and laughing.

❀❀❀

Some campers have physical control over the elements -- along with the ability to understand ancient Greek coming out of the cradle and inhumanly battle-fast reflexes, it's possibly the coolest thing about being a child of the Greek gods.

The children of Demeter, for instance, can manipulate vines and long tendrils of crawling ivy as naturally as if they were extensions of their own arms, and there was that one time they _coated_ the inside of Mark's trunk with mold after he programmed their alarm clocks to squall Aaron Carter at ridiculous hours of the morning, in retaliation for something Eduardo can't keep track of. Afterwards, Mark subsisted the rest of summer on approximately two pairs of underwear, which more punished the people around Mark than it was ever much of a hardship for him.

Sometimes, during particularly heated moments, the children of Ares and Hephaestus can make the torches flare up bright and hot without touching them, but none of them have yet been able to conjure it on their own. The people who would have _real_ mastery over the elements would be the children of the Big Three: of Zeus, who could call lightning from a blue sky; of Poseidon, who could breathe underwater and communicate between bodies of water; and of Hades, who could crack the earth into fissures and raise the bones of monsters.

Granted, nobody has seen a child of the Big Three since that one time the Allied Powers had a little bit of a tussle with the Axis, because Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades made a pact to spare the earth from their warmongering offspring, which only leaves the Demeter kids with any real demonstrable _powers._

"I've never been able to commune with the strawberries, though," Eduardo points out, a little blankly.

"It wasn't that," Divya insists. He's dragged them out around back of the forges, volunteering to hose down the tools; it's a secluded area, where Divya can let his guard down and let himself say nice things for a change. He's got a reputation to uphold as a son of Ares, otherwise, and Eduardo won't tell.

He frowns. In the four years they've been at Camp, Divya has _never_ brought this opinion up with him.

Divya offers him a smile, a little self-deprecating. "I assumed you were a Demeter kid just because ... well, you're too _nice_ to fit anywhere else."

❀❀❀

"I don't know," says Mark, toneless, when at last Eduardo gets around to posing the question to him.

He'd been expecting that. He sighs a little. "Mark ..."

"Wardo," Mark returns equably, his attention shifting. It's a quiet evening, a little muggy still with the wavering humidity but not unpleasant. The cicadas are shrieking so loud in the fields that it's difficult to listen to himself think. Castor and Pollux are on the other side of the campfire, two waifish boys who are the newest addition to the Dionysus cabin; Eduardo can't tell if they're twins, or, like Mark and Dustin, they're brothers whose mothers were pregnant at the same time. It's not something he feels comfortable asking a pair of third-grade boys.

"It's important to me," Eduardo says finally. There's a guitar in his lap, a soft wooden weight against his thighs, which he borrowed from the Apollo cabin while they did their cleaning. His fingers drift over the strings with only the most basic level of comprehension; he pays attention sometimes when the Apollo boys play, but not enough to have a good grasp on what to do with an instrument.

"I know," says Mark hotly, like he's offended that Eduardo didn't think he was aware of that. "I just don't think ..."

_It's as important as I think it is,_ Eduardo finishes for him.

Mark has one of Christy's spiderlike creatures bent over one knee, all its mechanics exposed belly-up. The Hephaestus cabin and the Hermes kids are always meddling in each other's projects; Chiron encourages inter-cabin cooperation, but everyone else hates it because they're a tour-de-force when they're combined, two cabins of tinkers and engineers.

Eduardo plucks a chord on the guitar; it warbles at him, despondent.

"Look," goes Mark, like this is too much. "Since you haven't been claimed yet, that probably means you're the child of one of the minor gods."

This has crossed Eduardo's mind before. There are a _lot_ more gods out there than the major twelve who have council seats up on Mt. Olympus, but because they're less important on the Olympic scale, when they produce offspring with mortal men and women, those offspring aren't usually plagued with the same development problems the children of the twelve do; the attention defecit disorders and the propensity for attracting monsters who want to pick their teeth with their yellowed bones.

Some, of course, wind up at Camp regardless. Bob's a year-rounder, like Eduardo and Divya, and he's a son of Hebe, the goddess of youth. Since she doesn't have her own cabin, Bob has nowhere to go but Hermes, along with every other child the gods don't particularly care to acknowledge.

There are goddeses like Nemesis (who Dustin thought might have been Divya's mom because she's the goddess of revenge) and Nike (goddess of victory, which Eduardo _knows_ he isn't, because he's never won anything in his entire life) and gods like Aeolus (god of the winds, which makes Eduardo wonder if those children would have elemental powers) and Eros (whose children are always blind, if you believe the stories, because love is blind.)

"And if you are," Mark continues. "Then you belong with us in Hermes anyway. So. It doesn't matter, Wardo, let it go."

It's easier said than done, of course, because every abandoned child wishes, at some point or another, that they had parents. It's not something he can just reason away.

At dinner every day, when he scrapes a bit of food off his plate as offering to the gods, he sends up a prayer to each one of them.

Just in case.

❀❀❀

Close to the end of August, as the heat rolls over them, relentlessly humid and hot to the point where the water nymphs don't even want to lift their heads above the surface of the lake, not even to spit water at campers who drift too close to their cove, the cabin leaders get together to discuss what the commemorative bead for this year should be.

Because absolutely nothing of interest happened this summer, it takes them quite a long time. 

Arguably the most exciting thing that went down was Ares claiming Divya as his son, but he isn't the only one who got claimed this summer; there's also Castor and Pollux and little Charlie Beckendorf, so it would be rude to them if they just used Ares's symbol for the bead. Eduardo thinks that Divya getting claimed is more significant, since he's been waiting longer, but he's biased.

Each camper is given a woven necklace when they first arrive, onto which they eventually put a bead; one bead for each year they manage to stay alive.

Eduardo wears his wrapped around his wrist, looped twice around to make it fit, and sometimes when he's sparring, the beads will catch painfully against his wrist's knobby bones.

They finally decide on the miniature image of a violin, because about half-way through July, two of the older campers, a satyr, and a tree nymph named Juniper snuck Stuart Singer of Apollo out of Camp so that he could play in a competition in Manhattan for young prodigies, or whatever it was. Absolutely nothing went wrong, and they were back before anyone noticed they were gone, but Stuart won the competition. It's enough.

It's Eduardo's fifth bead. After the farewell bonfire, when they're distributed and parting toasts are made, Eduardo sees Stuart running his back and forth between his fingers, thumb smoothing down the violin symbol. He's smiling, uncertain but proud.

❀❀❀

By the beginning of September, everyone is gone. Some, like Dustin and Chris, are driven to the nearest airport or Amtrak station by Argus, the hundred-eyed guardsman, and others, like Mark and the Winklevoss twins, have family nearby who come and pick them up, parking outside the boundary line. Mortals aren't able to cross into Camp -- any that try are fried alive. Eduardo tries not to wonder if Mark drags his feet because he's hoping his mother will forget that.

Eventually, the only people who remain are Chiron, Mr. D, the satyrs and nymphs, and about fifteen year-rounders, who stay because they have nowhere else to go, and no family except for what they've made for themselves.

At first, it's nice -- Eduardo appreciates having a bunk bed to himself. After a summer crammed into the narrow nooks and crannies of Hermes with two dozen other campers, it's ridiculously luxurious to have a choice; does he want to sleep on the top bunk, or the bottom bunk?

Without Divya, the only kids left in Hermes during the school year are Eduardo, Bob, and Alice. They train and do their chores during the day, and on the cabin floor at night, they play Yahtzee, Olympusopoly, and games of War so violent it leaves their hands stinging. Each one of them tries not to feel like a third wheel to the other two. It was just easier with four.

Demeter is one of the smallest cabins, and not a single member stays once summer is over, so the year-rounders take turns watering and repotting the plants they leave behind.

By the time Eduardo's turn rolls around, the Christmas cactus sitting all along the sills are a rioting mass of flowers, which looks very nice amidst the brown autumnal colors of the rest of Camp, and he'd be suitably impressed by it, if only he didn't already know that Christmas cactus flowers furiously only when it's being neglected.

He hoses them down with a liquid fertilizer that the tree nymphs and the Demeter kids concocted; it's murky and smells kind of like rotting hot dogs, so he probably doesn't want to know what's in it.

The cinder-girl watches him. 

All the cabins are built around the enormous pit-fire she tends to, making sure it never goes out, so they have a pretty clear view of each other. When she catches him looking back at her, she smiles, showing a clear, white set of child's teeth.

"I'm sorry," says Eduardo when he finishes, coiling up the hose and then walking over to her. "It's embarrassing to admit, but I don't think I have ever asked what your name is."

Her smile grows. Her voice, when she answers, is like embers and crackling wood, and echoes with the strange double inflection of the gods. "My name is Hestia."

Heart turning over in his chest, Eduardo drops to one knee, as quickly as if he'd been dealt a blow to the back of the head.

"M-my lady," he fumbles, completely mortified, his head bowed and eyes fixed on the dry ridges of dirt and sparse grass in front of him. He's been ignoring her existence since he was _ten._ He'd assumed ... actually, he didn't know _what_ he assumed, since she wasn't a monster, wasn't one of the cleaning harpies, wasn't a nymph, and wasn't a camper. Nobody had told him _who_ she was. "I had -- I had _no_ idea --"

The goddess hops down from her spot sitting on the low stone wall surrounding the pit. She's taken on the form of a little girl, flat-chested and tangle-haired, dressed in sackcloth like Cinderella and covered in more soot than the entire Hephaestus cabin put together.

"Don't worry," she says, and folds herself down to sit cross-legged next to him, like she's genuinely trying to reassure him. " _Nobody_ notices me. I'm the invisible Olympian."

Up this close, he can see the flickering in her eyes -- it's not just a reflection from the fire, there's _actual_ burning flames in her eyes, warm and cheerful.

"Goddess of the hearth," he goes, almost a question. "Home is where the hearth is."

She nods. Freckles dust her nose.

After a beat, Eduardo breaks his kneel and sits on the ground beside her.

❀❀❀

Winter comes and goes; Zephyr, the cold northern wind, howls hungrily at the eaves of the cabin for three straight days. When Mr. D comes back from arguing with the rest of Olympus during the Winter Solstice, same as every year, he and Zephyr get into a bellowing match that involves a lot of dirty insults about everybody's mother, but they get left alone after that. Then it is spring, and summer again, and Eduardo is fifteen.

Mark is fourteen, and he gets the entire Apollo cabin feuding against them in a way that makes the hostility between Zeus and Hera look like a minor disagreement about who left the toilet seat up.

" _Why_ did you have to open your mouth, Mark?" Dustin groans. He looks miserable when drenched. Behind him, Alice lifts her arms disbelievingly, hands extended; sour cream and lettuce drip off the ends of her fingertips, and run slickly through her hair. Eduardo's clothes will smell like salsa for days, and judging by the look on Chris's face, he really, really doesn't like cheese, especially when it's been dumped on him from overhead.

"TACOS!" comes the triumphant roar from across the commons -- the Apollo kids laying claim to their victory.

Mark's eyes thin to slits, predatory. The salsa streaks down his face, staining it in red rivulets. "Erica Albright," he announces, slowly and viciously. "Is a bitch."

Like somehow it's not his fault at _all_ that they're in this situation.

"She's the Apollo girl. She's the _only_ Apollo girl." Chris's voice comes out through gritted teeth. "Did you think you could get away with calling her _useless_ and her brothers were just going take that lying down?"

"Apollo girls _are_ useless!" Mark fires back, and his tone has Eduardo and Dustin exchanging panicked looks over his head: that's the tone of a moody fourteen-year-old boy, and it never ends well for anyone. "They never amount to anything, that's not an observation, that's a _fact._ I was stating a _fact._ Nobody cares about daughters of Apollo, just like nobody cares about sons of Aphrodite!"

And then he cringes, like he knows he overstepped, and Eduardo wonders if he cringed after insulting Erica to her face, and whether or not she was too busy seeing red to catch it.

Chris's face blanks out, mouth twisting up like it's been wrenched right out of its frame, but at that moment, the Stoll twins come in through the door, stopping mid-sentence at the destruction that's taken place inside their cabin; sour cream, lettuce, salsa, and cheese splattered over every person and surface.

Then the one on the left -- Travis or Connor, Eduardo still has the rest of summer to learn how to tell the difference -- splits into a brilliant, gap-toothed smile. 

"Tacos!" he goes. "Wicked!"

❀❀❀

When it comes to retaliation, the Stoll twins prove to be invaluable.

"So the sons of Hermes turn out to be worth something after all," Chris comments mildly, gathered at the window with everyone else while, out in the commons by Hestia's fire-pit, the Apollo boys (and Erica) are strip-searched by the harpies, searching for illegal contraband that -- somehow, it's a mystery -- they were convinced the Apollo kids had in their possession.

"I resent that," pipes up Dustin. Alice is balanced on his shoulders to get a better look, the two of them teetering precariously. The cabin is really too small for all of them.

"You resemble it," Chris returns, without heat.

Mark rolls his eyes, but when Travis and Connor Stoll sidle over to him with identical mischievous grins, he bumps knuckles with them in begrudging approval.

"Not bad, little minions."

Eighteen is the general age campers graduate and venture out into the real world, armed with the skills to conquer monsters and the nightmare things. Everything outside of that is up to them. Arguably, the cabins most apt for success are Athena (who problem-solve with the best and are highly intelligent, although "intelligent" for their kind just translates to "functional" in the human world) and Apollo (who are jacks-of-all-trades; rock stars and healers and poets and truthsayers, so they adapt well.) Apollo mostly only has sons, though, which is maybe why Mark had no impulse control about telling Erica she's useless. It's true, Eduardo can't think of one daughter of Apollo who went on to become famous.

That doesn't mean Erica isn't going to be the first.

That summer, the Winklevoss twins grow two inches in June alone, becoming so bean-pole thin it's like there isn't enough skin to cover their elongating bones, and the head of the Hermes cabin takes off in the middle of the night. The note on her pillow says she's run off to be a nun. Eduardo isn't sure the children of the Greek gods are technically allowed to belong to any other religion. More power to her.

"You should apply to be cabin leader!" Dustin goes at lunch the next day, ribbing Eduardo with his elbow.

Eduardo flinches away from the jab; speaking of people who are growing so fast they seem to have lost sense of where their bodies are in space, Dustin's elbows are a hazard. "I have to be an actual son of Hermes to apply for the position," he reminds him.

Dustin's face falls. "Oh, right," he goes, and covers by turning to his glass and asking it politely for strawberry milk. Dustin is the only kid his age Eduardo knows who still happily asks for strawberry milk.

In the end, Alice gets elected the new head of the Hermes cabin, for reasons that include her being seventeen and more patient than the Hermes kids probably deserve. Nobody is surprised, but Alice looks like she wasn't expecting it; they hand her a laurel wreath and she flushes dark, smiling. She has the prettiest smile out of anybody Eduardo knows; her teeth a gleam of bright-white bone, like the Cheshire cat's.

❀❀❀

Christy asks him to go with her to the fireworks show for the 4th of July.

"You mean, like, as your date?" Eduardo tries to clarify, wanting desperately to know what's going on. You only go _with_ someone to the fireworks show when you want to, like, you know, do _date_ things. Opportunities are a little thin on the ground, otherwise. Sometimes kids get caught necking in the stables, flushed out with their shirts askew and hay in their hair.

"Yes," she goes, nodding. Her earrings jingle, soft as windchimes. "If you're lucky, I might even let you touch my butt."

Eduardo nearly walks into the door.

She comes and fetches him around sunset. He's been in the arena all day, coaching the youngest campers on their basic swordplay techniques, so he smells like sweat, dirt, and metal, which Christy has no problem informing him, her nose wrinkled up. She looks stunning -- instead of the usual orange Camp shirt, she's wearing a fitted blouse the color of cream, and her hair hangs loose around her shoulders. Eduardo is so used to it being wrapped up under the yellow scarf that it leaves him blinking, overwhelmed. It looks glossy and smooth. 

Never mind her butt, he kind of wants to touch her hair.

Technically, the Hephaestus cabin is in charge of the fireworks show -- any excuse to show off their pyrotechnic ability and blow things up in a Camp-sanctioned way -- but Christy must have left it to her brothers and sisters, because she pushes Eduardo onto his back on their blanket as soon as the sun slips away. They kiss like that, rolling onto their sides, and he can feel the percussion against his skin as each firework explodes, can see the light flare on the backs of his eyelids, but it's just background to the pressure of Christy's mouth, the explorative touch of her fingertips to the skin at his hip.

Her hair is as glossy and smooth as it looks. Her earrings today are made of broken bits of blown glass, and they bump against his knuckles when he tilts her head for a better angle.

When the fireworks stop, they stay where they are, on the blanket in the dark, their only company the sound of their mouths, smacking, and the lakewater rushing up against the shore.

Eduardo keeps his eyes closed, a deep burn of contentment low in his chest.

He wonders what he did to deserve this. Out of everybody Christy could have asked, why him.

Eventually, a rag-tag band of campers prowl on by, carrying torches and looking for couples that are doing exactly what Eduardo and Christy are doing. They hear them coming, their playful jeering catcalls carrying clearly across the lake, so by the time they find them, Eduardo and Christy only have to grab their blanket and take off running.

The other campers yell, startled, when they break right through them. They're carrying water balloons, and they go wide when thrown after their retreating backs. Christy shrieks as one explodes against the tree trunk where her head was a moment before.

Eduardo grabs her hand, tugging her back in the direction of the cabins.

"I don't care!" she laughs, tangling up with him to kiss his mouth. They stagger with momentum, bumping up against another tree trunk, and fall apart, breathless and giggly.

Glancing over his shoulder, Eduardo catches a flash of Mark through the trees, a torch in one hand and water balloon in the other. He's the only one not laughing. Eduardo wonders if he tried to talk to Erica today, and that's what put that expression on his face. Then Christy pulls him away, and he forgets.

❀❀❀

A couple days later, the sun hangs hot in the sky, and while they're up in the strawberry fields, Eduardo finally plucks up the courage to ask, "Do you want to be my girlfriend?"

Elysian Fields Strawberries is the Camp's cover in the mortal world. Thanks to the nymphs and the Demeter kids, the strawberries do pretty well for themselves, but occasionally the more seasoned campers are sent up to scout through them, because sometimes, hellhounds and empousi will be hiding out among the plants.

Like she has no idea how fast his heart is rabbiting in his chest, Christy plucks a strawberry off the vine as she goes by, scraping flecks of mud off its flesh with her thumbnail and popping into her mouth. They're not quite ripe yet, and she makes a face at the flavor.

"No," she decides.

Eduardo's throat works. He licks his lips and tries, "Why not?"

This time, she does look back at him. The whip-cord muscles in her arms show under her shirt, built up from the hours she spends pounding hot iron, fresh out of the fires, and she has a hammer swinging from her belt, easily accessible should something jump out at them and try to eat them.

She tugs at her scarf, pulling it more snug over her forehead. Eduardo thinks about getting her a new scarf, something not so battered-looking.

"If I wanted to date somebody," she begins, picking her way along carefully. "It would be a mortal. A human. Have you ever tried to kill one? They're sturdy little things. Us? Not so much. Haven't you noticed, Eduardo -- how so few of us ever make it to old age? We die young, and we die fast, because there's nothing on this earth more expendable than us. The heroes."

Mortals cannot be killed by the creatures of the immortal world; they cannot even see them. Likewise, immortals cannot be harmed by the things of the mortal world (no matter how many sad 90s love songs Apollo tries to write about mortal girls who've broken his heart.) But their children? Kids like Eduardo and Christy and Mark and Divya and even sweet, nervous Stuart Singer? They can be killed by anything in either world.

That's why Chiron calls them heroes, Eduardo supposes. Just being here is amazingly brave of them.

"I don't want to fall in love with someone I might outlive," Christy confesses. Her voice is quiet, and all around them, the strawberry plants sway in the sunlight.

❀❀❀

Eduardo has lived at Camp for almost seven years, and yet, it's not even the majority of his life, for all that it feels like it.

He remembers the real world, sometimes, in bits and flashes.

He remembers Alana, who raised him. She was fluent in Spanish, English, and Stubborn, and in the mornings, she went to work as a maid, getting up at four-thirty to take the bus to the rich side of the city. She brought home half-eaten dishes in Tupperware, rather than throw them out, things that tasted good even when reheated and rubbery, and they ate around the bite marks. There were five of them, Eduardo and four girls, all trained to lie to Social Services from the moment they could talk. Alana worked too many hours a week; it was the kids' responsibility to make sure they helped each other out until she got home. They didn't want to be taken away.

He remembers school, too, trying to put letters together to make words. The letters would sommersault across his page, and never went in the right order.

There were tests he didn't understand, jumbles of nonsense words on a piece of paper. He was always the last one sitting there after everybody else was done, putting his pencil at the top of the desk and letting it roll downwards into his open palm.

His teachers frowned at him a lot, he remembers that, too.

The satyr found him when he was ten and brought him to Camp. Eduardo still isn't sure what tipped them off -- kids like him start attracting monsters at a certain age; furies and hounds, medusas and hydras, all hungry, all angry, all wanting a bite of Olympian child, but Eduardo wasn't old enough then. He didn't exhibit any powers, either, that he's aware of. Maybe it was just his test scores.

He hasn't left Camp since, but Mark has no problem filling him in on what he's missing.

He uses words like "handicapped" and "special needs," none of which Eduardo has ever felt applied to them, but that's how the real world sees them.

He talks about the kids at school who tease him for not getting it, for the halting way he reads out loud, for being the last one to laugh at a joke, for never cluing into a situation that's awkward. Everybody else just _senses_ these things: Mark can skewer a chimera through the eye with a knife thrown at fifteen paces, but what use is that during scholarship dinners?

"I don't know why he wants to be so smart," he tells Hestia, frowning and picking up a bit of charcoal, turning it over in his hands before bending down to scratch shapes into the dirt; alpha, omega, epsilon, theta -- letters that come to him more easily and clearly than the English characters ever did.

"Your friend?" Hestia goes.

"My best friend," he corrects. "He wants to be smart the way humans are smart -- by being _clever._ Mean clever, wordy clever, better-than-everyone clever," he elaborates, at her puzzled expression. "He hates being that kid with disabilities."

She muses over this for a moment, drumming the brick wall with her heels.

"Do you think he's smart?" she asks him finally.

He doesn't even need to think. "He stole Christy's Walkman and programmed it to only play the songs he likes. It recognizes people's taste in music. If that's not brilliant, then what is."

❀❀❀

The next summer, Eduardo is sixteen, Mark is fifteen, and the unexpected happens.

Mark is given a Quest.

Chiron clip-clops past their table at breakfast, stopping to say, "Good morning, young heroes. Mr. Moskowitz, I like the, um, _artwork_ you seem to have made with your hair."

"Thanks, sir!" Dustin chirps, completely oblivious to the sarcasm.

Smiling good-naturedly and still eyeballing Dustin's spiked-out mass of hair, Chiron bends his torso down, horsetail flicking. He lowers his voice, almost casual as he says, "And Marcus, the Oracle wants to see you as soon as you're finished with your breakfast."

It's such an innocuous thing to say that at first, nobody really registers what the words mean. And then Mark freezes, and the table falls silent. This kind of absolute quiet is so rare at the Hermes table that conversation dies at other tables, too, curious kid faces turning to look.

"The Oracle?" Mark echoes, in that careful, flat way he gets when he's taking stock of a situation.

There's only one reason anyone is summoned to see the Oracle.

After breakfast, everyone else is shooed right off to their chores. Eduardo isn't the only one who drags his feet, but he is the only one who doubles back behind the stables, skirts around the dining hall, and comes out on the far side of the Big House, just in time to see Mark square his shoulders and climb the porch steps. The Oracle is in the attic, Eduardo remembers; that's where she lives, concocting prophecies for campers who are given Quests by their Olympian parents as a way to test their bravery and skills. (Or, at least, that's what it says on the tin.)

The Big House is built plantation-style, with a wrap-around porch, shutters that clatter and bang in the wind, and big white columns supporting the upstairs balcony.

Eduardo hunkers down against one of these columns to wait.

It's an age before he hears Mark's footsteps on the stairs, the screen door creaking a moment later. His face is a mess of things, teeth catching his bottom lip at an angle, so distracted that he doesn't even notice Eduardo sitting there until he almost trips right over him.

"Hey," goes Eduardo, standing quickly. "What did she say?"

There's a thin scrim of dust edging the seat of Mark's jeans, like maybe he sat up there in the attic for awhile, thinking. It certainly doesn't take that long to deliver a prophecy.

"I'm being sent to the city," Mark says finally, and shoves his hands into his pockets.

_That's not bad,_ Eduardo thinks with a flush of relief -- he's seen campers sent on truly bizarre Quests over the years, to strange places all over the country, so New York City is a nice change. It's close, and its monsters are familiar. There are worse places for Mark to go. "Why?" he asks out loud, and then quickly, "Are you allowed to tell me?"

Mark's eyes flit up to his, and then away again immediately, like he's caught them against something that burned.

"I don't think so," he says, after a beat that lasts just a little too long.

Eduardo blinks, fighting off a sudden twitch of loneliness. It's like before, when they were younger and he did something wrong, how Mark would ignore him in the dining hall, like if he pretended Eduardo didn't exist, then Eduardo's embarrassment wouldn't become his own. It feels a lot like that, as Mark goes down the porch steps, Eduardo following a pace behind, but he doesn't know what he did. Was it something the Oracle said?

Still.

Still, Eduardo thinks, as Mark packs a backpack -- nectar and ambrosia in case of injuries, golden drachma to send Iris-calls with, canteen of water, paperback book and his souped-up Walkman -- and slips on a vest underneath his hoodie, sharp knives tucked into their individual slots, that it's just a Quest. Mark will get done whatever it is Hermes wants him to do, and then he'll come home.

What could possibly go wrong in one summer?

❀❀❀

Mark has been gone for seven days when the water nymphs haul Billy Olsen's body out of the lake and lay it in pieces on the shore. It has been chewed on; jagged, jaw-shaped tears in his bloodless flesh. Katie Gardener, the newest addition to Demeter, is the first to come across it, and brings the rest of Camp running with her screams.

Come nightfall, they shroud the body and burn it on a funeral pyre.

Standing with Dustin, Chris, Alice, and the other Hermes kids, as Castor and Pollux give a shaky eulogy, Eduardo can't help but think of what Christy said. If there's one thing the Greek gods are very good at it, it's getting their children killed. Campers die young, and they die quickly, because no matter their talents, no matter how hard they train, dying is what they do best.

"-- they never come this far inland," Eduardo overhears Chiron commenting to Mr. D when everyone is dismissed, his voice hushed and angry. Worry makes the corners of his eyes pucker.

"I know that," Mr. D returns, his footsteps dragging. "Something's not right."

Chiron starts to say something, but his ears flick and he looks up, catching sight of Eduardo lingering just within earshot, trying to catch more of their conversation. He makes a sympathetic face, like he knows exactly what Eduardo's doing and why, but Mr. D just throws him an impatient, dismissive look.

Of course, Eduardo thinks, shocked that he had somehow forgotten. Billy had been the head of the Dionysus cabin. Mr. D's son.

He ducks his head and hurries to join the others.

For days afterwards, the air feels heavy, soupy, like there's a storm coming. Eduardo isn't sure if it's just him, but he's pretty sure he sees furious lightning streaking out of a blue sky.

❀❀❀

The Mark that returns to Camp at the end of July is not the same one that left.

It's not the physical, although he is leaner, cut slender by weeks of foraging for himself in the city. His hair is haphazardly shorn, showing torn and hastily-sewn scalp in the back, the wound clean and slathered with salve. He's missing all the fingernails on his left hand except for the pinky, and when Eduardo first catches sight of him, crossing the commons with the single-minded determination of someone who's been dreaming of their bed for so long they've forgotten what it really look likes, he's limping.

Later, after a welcome-home feast is thrown in honor of his success and they're back in Hermes, Mark peels off his sneakers and his socks and flops back onto the bottom bunk with an impossible noise of relief, and Eduardo sees why he's got a limp: he's missing the last three toes from his left foot, and it's thrown his balance off.

So yes, there are physical differences, but it's more than that. Mark comes home lit-up, full of expressions that Eduardo had almost forgotten his face could make, like before he was just a clay doll, and then he went to the city and Prometheus found him there, breathing the eternally-burning fire of man right into his lungs.

There is a part of Eduardo that wants to thank every god he can name that Mark didn't come home in pieces like Billy Olsen.

This part is smaller than he'd like.

He came home, yes, but he brought Sean Parker with him.

Sean is far older than any new camper they've ever received before, which turns him into an overnight celebrity. He's Christy and Alice's age, and at first, Eduardo thinks he must be the son of a god so minor that he's basically mortal and that's how he went undetected for so long, but there's a shark-like sharpness to the way Sean speaks and moves that convinces him otherwise. Sean's always been able to see the monsters that mortals can't see, and he learned how to fight them by himself, without the protection and the help of Camp.

His third night, standing between Mark and Eduardo as they give their usual food offering to the gods, Sean's mother claims him.

Eduardo feels the hush before his ears register it.

Looking up, confused, his fork still poised over green beans and mashed potatoes, he catches sight of the emblem glowing over Sean's head, just before Sean himself turns and addresses Chiron at the high table, his voice almost angry. "What is this?"

"Your goddess mother has claimed you as her own, Mr. Parker," Chiron answers, with a sagely bow of his head. "Son of Eris."

The goddess of discord.

This is clearly news to Sean, whose face does a number of interesting things, ranging from resentful to proud and back with a twitch of his eyebrows, but behind him, Mark's eyes are thinned, thoughtful, like he already knew. Sean likes to talk about how he found Mark, out there on his own in the big bad city, but now, watching the open, calculating expression on Mark's face, Eduardo wonders if maybe it wasn't the other way around.

❀❀❀

Mark wakes him up in the middle of the night to tell him, "I'm going to change my name."

Fuzzy, uncertain, Eduardo blinks the sleep out of his eyes. Mark's hand comes into focus first, the ends of his fingers puckered and strange-looking with the loss of his nails -- Eduardo still isn't sure where those injuries came from; Sean's story involves being tortured by furies for information Mark valiantly refused to give up, but he's fairly sure that's an exaggeration. Mark has climbed the ladder between their bunks (it's one of the perks of surviving this long; they outrank the younger Hermes kids and get actual beds of their own, although sometimes Eduardo misses the nest they made of their sleeping bags, children sleeping underneath the open window,) and is hovering over him. His eyes are bright and clear, like he hasn't been to sleep yet.

Eduardo scrubs a hand over his face. His brain throbs protestingly; Sean planned an excursion with Dustin and the Stoll twins (who are only twelve, dammit,) to procure alcohol from the dining hall. His memories of the night, up until this point, includes only flashes of Sean, gleefully whooping, "Martini and olives, the most useful thing ever concocted by a demigod, and that includes the godsdamn Declaration of Independence!" and handing Mark a glass full of nuclear, apple-green liquid.

He remembers watching, swinging in the hammock with a giggling Dustin, and seeing it all unfold with that wrenching, horrible sensation familiar to every lonely child who has ever sat and watched their best friend become best friends with someone else.

Yeah, he remembers that pretty clearly.

"Wardo," whispers Mark. The bunk creaks under their combined weight. "Did you hear me?"

"Yeah," Eduardo croaks back. He blinks again. "What's wrong with the one you got?"

Mark just shrugs, a twitchy jerk of his shoulders.

"My last name," he says after a beat, like he should probably clarify. "I'm dropping the Castellan. It's cleaner."

"All right, fair enough," Eduardo goes agreeably, turning his face back into his pillow. And, "go to sleep, Mark."

❀❀❀

Not once in all the years Eduardo has known him has Mark ever invited him out to his house during the school year (neither, for that matter, did Dustin or Chris, or even Christy, who lived close enough that it wouldn't have been difficult to persuade Argus to drive him out for a day.) He always got the impression that Mark didn't want him to meet his mother, or deal with his little brother, or see the way they lived, and Eduardo could understand that.

So there isn't really an accurate way to describe _how_ he feels, exactly, when at the end of August, Sean slings his backpack over his shoulder with a "later, _War_ do," and trails after Mark when Mark's mother arrives to pick him up.

The morning after Mark woke him in the dead of night to announce his name change, the two of them brought back a flat blade from the training arena and scraped the lettering off of Mark's trunk; chunks of golden "C"s and "L"s fell to the floor boards between their feet. When they were done, it read exactly what Mark wanted it to read: Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark's mother doesn't seem to notice; she's too busy sizing up Sean, blinking a little like she's looking into a bright light, like she has absolutely no idea how to compartmentalize the reality that her son possesses an actual friend.

But hanging back by the car, Luke notices.

Eduardo watches from just inside the boundary line as Luke sidesteps Sean completely and ducks in close to whisper something to his brother. Their hands tangle on the handle of the trunk, their blonde curls mingling.

It's the first time he's ever seen Luke look at Mark with anything other than casual resentment.

❀❀❀

The next summer, Mark doesn't come back.

❀❀❀

Eduardo is seventeen.

This is the year that cell phones first start becoming more common out in the real world. Chiron is excited about trying them, talking up all the possibilities and all the ways this invention of "mobile communications," he calls them, could work for the benefit of their kind. The cell phones he's talking about are the big, bulky Nokia ones, and they look a lot like walkie-talkies, which Eduardo supposes makes sense.

They learn, very quickly, that they act like a homing device, and will attract any ravenous monster in a ten-mile radius.

It's one of those things about mortal technology that nobody can predict, and that summer, when KC, the cabin leader for Athena, is given a Quest, she takes Stuart Singer from Apollo and Bob from Hebe with her. Chiron gives her a cell phone, which she dutifully packs along with their rations of ambrosia and nectar. None of them even make it to the New York state line.

In terms of numbers, it's the worst loss any of them have lived through.

The day after they get the news, nobody gets anything done. For people like Eduardo, who has literally _never_ spent a night without Bob being in the same room since they were children, even if they didn't run in the same circles of friends, it's devastating. After breakfast -- during which Mr. D clears his throat twice in an attempt to start saying something, but never finds the words -- he comes across Divya in the stables, up in the hayloft. The pegasi watch him curiously as he hauls himself up the ladder. Divya turns his face away so Eduardo can't see how flushed and streaked it is, but Divya lived in Hermes with them until he got claimed, and he's gotten caught necking with KC more than once. Eduardo even thinks they might have been dating, in the way he and Christy weren't brave enough to try, for exactly this reason.

He sits down next to Divya, the wood creaking with his weight.

Hestia comes to find them around lunch-time, and Eduardo's the only one who makes any attempt to come to attention out of respect, but she waves him off. She's brought apples, which are easy enough to keep down. Even Divya straightens up to eat, scrubbing at his face.

Her eyes look raw, like maybe she's been crying, too. Eduardo didn't know the immortals _could_ cry.

He rubs his thumb over the bead with the violin stamp that Stuart Singer earned them the summer he was fifteen. It's nice, though, he guesses in an uncharitable way, that _some_ of them notice.

Then he remembers the way Mr. D had looked at Billy's funeral, and immediately feels bad for the thought. There are gods who care about their children.

The point is, Eduardo is seventeen, people close to him have died, and the Winklevoss twins eventually come looking for Divya. He misses his best friend.

He finds the Castellan-Zuckerberg's number in the directory in the Big House.

❀❀❀

It takes him three tries before Mark's mother even remembers that she has a son named Mark, much less if he's around and could she please put him on the line. Mark never said it directly, but it was implied, and at some point when they were both little, Eduardo picked up on it and learned not to ask for specifics: put simply, Ms. Castellan-Zuckerberg's brains got addled by some event right after giving birth to her second son. She's not altogether there.

Mark and Luke deal with this in their own ways.

"Why aren't you here?" Eduardo blurts out the instant he hears Mark's voice on the other end, clipped and querulous, and then grimaces. That's not how he intended to start this conversation.

"... Wardo?" Mark goes, and then, "How are you calling me?"

"There's a land line in the Big House," Eduardo replies. "And it's cheaper than trying to catch you with an Iris message. Whatever, Mark, it's not important, listen, it's almost the end of the month. Aren't you coming to Camp soon? We could use your help for the races."

There's only silence for a long, long beat.

Eduardo shifts the receiver to the other ear, swallowing hard and then starting, "Mark --"

"Have you noticed?" Mark cuts in, tone sharp, like he thinks Eduardo is being stupid for thinking about _races._ "Something's wrong. There's been an increase in the number of monsters _actively_ trying to hunt us down."

"I definitely have." In his mind's eye, he can still see the funeral shrouds for KC and Stuart and Bob all lined up in a row. It's not an image that's going to go away anytime soon. He thinks of the things carved out of Mark's flesh -- the gash at his hairline, the missing fingernails, the missing toes -- and wonders, not for the first time, just how dangerous it is out in the real world.

"There's a reason. There has to be a reason. Did I ever tell you what the Oracle said to me?"

"No," Eduardo resists the urge to roll his eyes. "In fact, you got pretty clammed up about it."

"Good," he mutters distractedly. "Good, you don't need to know."

" _Mark,"_ Eduardo goes, annoyed now. Mark is using his _I'm simply proving that I'm cleverer than you_ voice. It might have gotten him through middle school by the skin of his teeth, but Eduardo thinks it's the most obnoxious thing about him. He doesn't _need_ to prove he's cleverer than everybody. He just _is._ Eduardo lets a breath out, and says, "Okay."

"What." He has Mark's attention now. "What. No, don't just _accept_ that as an answer. Wardo!"

Taken aback, Eduardo just blinks.

Mark breathes out in a huff; a sharp rasping cackle from the phone's earpiece. "I'm trying to stop a prophecy --" he stops himself, rallies, and before Eduardo can leap in and say anything, continues, "No. No, no. You know what your problem is?"

Eduardo's guard goes up immediately. _My speech therapist always told me that in civil discourse, you should avoid "you" statements,_ he remembers Christy telling him, primly. _Because by using the word "you," you turn it into their problem, and you make it sound like an attack, so they're less likely to listen to you._

But apparently listing Eduardo's problems is easier than actually explaining himself, because Mark steams right along, voice growing stronger, "You have never stood up and _fought_ for what you wanted. Ever. In your life. Why don't you ever _fight?_ Do you just accept everything, like, do you think that just because your daddy never stood up and claimed you and you accepted that, that you have to take everyone else's shit for as long as you --"

"Pot, kettle, color black!" Eduardo reminds him. His voice comes out completely level. "We all have daddy issues, Mark. Except for Chris, I guess, those would be mommy issues."

" _Don't --"_ Mark's voice tears out of him.

Eduardo squeezes his eyes shut. The phone cord is twisted up in his fingers.

"You've never had to live it," Mark breathes, and the quietness with which he says it scares Eduardo even more than the almost-yelling. "You don't know what it's like. You have _no_ idea what it's like for us in the real world, Wardo. You have these -- these _blinders,_ and you think that when you graduate from Camp, that nothing's _really_ going to change. But that will _never work._ You, you --" Something slams on the other end, like maybe Mark smacked his palm against the wall. "You can't even bring yourself to call us what we really _are!"_

"Mark." Eduardo just wants this to stop.

"You say Camp. Never the full name. You call us all _campers,_ like we're the godsdamn Parent Trap or something cute and harmless. We are _half-bloods,_ Wardo," he spits it out, vicious and low, and Eduardo's fingers clench around the plastic of the phone. "It is Camp _Half-Blood._ Half-blood, Eduardo. We are only half-human. _Half-_ human. We're never going to fit in with them, and we're never going to fit in with the gods. We might as well be half-dirt to both of them."

"Mark." 

That sad, weak thing coming out of his mouth can't possibly be his voice, can it?

"We are _nothing,"_ Mark says. "Do you understand that? I'm not coming back to Camp, Wardo. I am not going back to that life."

❀❀❀

They usher in the new millennium by gathering around the television in the Big House on New Years Eve, passing Bacchanate wine from Dionysus's secret store back and forth. Even the youngest year-rounders get a glass. ("Learning your alcohol tolerance early!" Mr. D says defensively, when Chiron shoots him an aggrieved look. "I am the god of wine! I consider that a valuable life skill!")

There are more year-rounders now than there have ever been, in all his years here. Eduardo tries not to read too deeply into it, or he'll start thinking in conspiracy theories the way Sean does.

Then it is summer again, and Eduardo is eighteen. This is the last summer he'll be at Camp. Christy and Alice are already gone. So are the Winklevoss twins; the Stoll twins are the only pair of twins left at Camp now, which is kind of unsettling. Dustin didn't come back, either, which worries Eduardo, because Dustin is only seventeen; he catches himself turning towards Dustin's hammock, some asinine comment floating on the tip of his tongue, and finds Ethan swinging there instead, sullen and silent. He gulps the words back, thrown off.

He spends most of 2000 hanging out with Divya, keeping their skills sharp and trying not to feel abandoned by everyone; being determined to sulk their way through the summer automatically means that everything conspires to make sure they can't, and Divya's littlest sister, an eleven-year-old named Clarisse, takes to following him around everywhere with a puppy-like devotion. Eduardo thinks it's adorable. Divya doesn't seem to know what to do.

Erica is the cabin leader for Apollo, and it looks like this summer will not be the summer that Aphrodite comes to her senses and officially claims Chris.

"Doesn't matter," Chris shrugs, good-natured. "At least I know who she is. She'll find a use for me someday, I'm sure, and I promise you, I will take vindictive pleasure in refusing to have anything to do with her, the same way she couldn't be bothered to have anything to do with me."

"Woah there," Eduardo holds out a palm, mock serious. "Put the diabolical away, man, it doesn't suit you."

Chris laughs. Their shoulders press together.

❀❀❀

He thinks, sometimes, about what Hestia said. How she's the invisible Olympian. The goddess that no one else cares about. He wonders if that's why she came down from Olympus to make Camp Half-Blood her home; Dionysus was exiled here, but Hestia came of her own choice.

When he brings it up with her, she giggles, covering her mouth with her hand. Her nails are blunt and crusted with soot. "Are you asking me if I feel at home here?"

"I guess I am." He shrugs. It's late August now, muggy even into the evening, and the bug song all around them has reached a crescendo pitch.

"I am," she nods. "We're all invisible here."

Looking back on it, it might have been this exchange that inspires Hestia to do what she does on Friday, during the last capture-the-flag game of the year, when Eduardo finds himself pinned into the moss and the dirt, held down by the swordpoints of the Ares cabin.

Divya is there, hanging behind his bigger, bulkier brothers, looking vaguely apologetic. They're very far away from all the action, as Eduardo is long-sighted and always assigned to be his team's guardsmen. Hermes is currently allied with Hephaestus (as always,) Demeter, and Apollo; a roster which definitely doesn't include the Ares kids, so they pulled Eduardo out of his tree and are now contemplating what they're going to do with him, since they have him prisoner and all.

"It's the last game of the year, though," goes one enormous boy, whose name Eduardo thinks might be Thom. He always complains about how crowded the Hermes cabin is, but when it comes to _multitudes_ of offspring, Ares is probably their stiffest competition. He loses track of them. "They're not going to notice if we rough him up."

" _I_ would notice," Eduardo protests from the ground.

"Shut up," goes one of the others. And, "We're not going to see any _real_ action -- the battle for the flag is all being done downstream. Come on, we won't hurt him that badly."

"Why do I have the feeling we're playing the Three Lies?" Eduardo sighs. He really doesn't want to end his last ever game of capture-the-flag by getting depantsed by the Ares cabin.

But Thom doesn't say anything; after a moment, the silence stretches, noticeable. To his left, Clarisse gasps; a soft, stifled noise, her eyes wide with shock.

And then two things happen at once.

Footsteps, soft on the pine needles behind him, and Divya drops to one knee, planting his sword point-down into the dirt.

"You will not lay a hand on him," comes Hestia's voice, calm and carrying with the double-toned inflection of the gods, and the rest of the Ares kids drop like she's felled them, kneeling hard. "Not now, and not ever."

For a moment, it's as if the entire forest goes silent, like even the trees and sky have turned to witness the moment. Eduardo sees the reflection in the blades of the Ares kids' swords before he lifts his eyes, and there it is, floating right above his head, the thing he's been waiting for his whole life: the emblem of his Olympian parent. His bloodline is determined.

He is claimed.

Her emblem glows as soft as Camp firelight; not the black anvil of Hephaestus or the angry, burning red crossed-swords of Ares, but a gentle, mellow candle flame, as orange as the fire she keeps stroked at the heart of Camp.

"You can't --" goes Divya, like he can't help it. He's staring, clear-eyed. Beside him, Clarisse's jaw is askew, equally dumbstruck. "You can't have children. He can't _really_ be yours. You're a --"

"I claim him," Hestia responds coolly. She steps over, bare toes spreading against the pine needles and the dirt, and bends down, offering Eduardo a hand up. "Family is more than blood. I would think you of all people know that. It doesn't matter which of my irresponsible siblings is his sire or dam. I claim him as my own."

She pulls Eduardo to his feet; he's grown up now, grown into all his limbs and finally filling out his shoulders, so he dwarfs her chosen form in size. But when she looks at him, her eyes burning flame-bright, there's nothing in there but pride.

"Eduardo Saverin," she says, not looking away, "is a son of Hestia."

❀❀❀

This is the first summer of a new century, and Eduardo is eighteen, and it's the year that Grover, a satyr so green he doesn't even have his horns yet, brings home three new half-bloods.

They're chased by monsters all the way to the boundary; when the alarm sounds through Camp, Eduardo's in the dining hall fetching chocolate for Katie Gardener (who claims she's just fighting some stomach thing, but Eduardo's lived in a co-ed cabin all his life and has been trained to recognize the signs of a cramping girl, so it's the least he can do) and so he's one of the first ones to arrive, sword in hand, just in time to see a girl struck down within sight of Camp.

He's standing right there when the clouds part with a great clap of thunder, loud enough to slam into his chest like a percussion beat. Lightning strikes groundwards, slaying the creature who killed her, and turns the girl herself into a pine tree.

Chiron wraps his arms around Grover and the two remaining half-bloods, keeping them upright, and looks up just as the lightning emblem blazes on the trunk of the tree.

"What's her name?" he asks, keeping his voice low.

Grover tries to say something, but only winds up braying, a sound so choked with grief that Eduardo finds himself averting his eyes, uncomfortable, but they swing back when the boy says, in a dazed, disbelieving voice, "Thalia. Thalia Grace." He's about fourteen, wearing a threadbare hooded sweatshirt and cargo shorts. All Eduardo can see from this angle is the back of his blonde, curly head.

"All hail Thalia Grace, daughter of Zeus," goes Chiron. "Because of her sacrifice, we have --"

He breaks off expectantly.

"Annabeth," goes the little girl on Grover's other side. She's barely seven years old, which easily makes her the youngest half-blood Eduardo has ever seen escorted over the boundary line. "My name's Annabeth Chase."

And then the boy turns his head, profile coming into sharp relief. Eduardo's blood runs cold.

"Luke Castellan," says Mark's little brother.

"Because of her sacrifice, we have Annabeth Chase and Luke Castellan with us today," Chiron finishes dutifully. "Come on, let's get you guys cleaned up. You look like you've come a long way."

_You dropped the Zuckerberg,_ Eduardo thinks, watching them make their unsteady way down the hill towards the Big House. The little girl, Annabeth, keeps glancing back at the pine tree, her eyes dark and enormously sad. _Just Luke Castellan. If you're here, where's Mark? Who's watching your mother? Why are you only just coming to Camp now?_ As long as Eduardo's known Mark, he's never seen Luke even so much as cross the Camp boundary. Until now, he only had Mark's word for it that Luke was a son of Hermes, too.

"What are you two up to?" he asks out loud.

❀❀❀

The bead that year, the final bead Eduardo and Chris and Erica and Divya work onto their necklaces at the farewell feast, carries the emblem of a pine tree on it.

"It's kind of morbid, don't you think?" Divya mutters, taking care to keep his voice low, because Annabeth seems to have a sixth sense for whenever people were talking about the Thalia tree; her response to her grief seems to be to swing into an extreme kind of protectiveness, refusing to even hear a single negative word. She remains unclaimed, but Eduardo would bet anything she's either a daughter of Athena or Apollo.

"She's a daughter of Zeus, Div," says Erica grimly, pulling her hair to the side and letting Eduardo re-knot the cord at the nape of her neck. "Zeus isn't supposed to have offspring. At all. There's a pact about it, sworn on the River Styx and everything. It is seriously, seriously bad news that he reneged."

"There's going to be so much shit going down on Olympus over this," Chris agrees.

Erica lifts her eyes. "Begs the question, doesn't it," she murmurs. "Was he the only one that broke the pact?"

Eduardo, who's been running the betting pool ever since the Winklevoss-squared left, just grimaces. The odds aren't very good at all.

❀❀❀

October cloaks itself in color; streaks of oranges, reds, and browns crown the tops of the trees.

He shuffles in his seat, uncomfortable, humiliated, and the more flustered he becomes, the more the letters swim across the page.

Why did no one ever tell him just how many _words_ there were in the real world? Everything requires reading. Everything requires numbers. He is just trying to function -- find somewhere to live, get a bank account, get a job so he can put things into the bank account so he can put himself into the place he finds to live -- and they are making it unnecessarily difficult. 

The bank teller frowns impatiently, and Eduardo rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands. Camp never prepared him for this, this self-doubt and this uncertainty. Monsters he can't kill with a sword.

He smoothes the form with the flat of his hand, rolling the pen between his fingers.

❀❀❀

In the winter of 2003, Eduardo stands in an alleyway behind an old brownstone building, alone except for lopsided fuse boxes coming off the walls and peeling green trash bins and the pay phone. The sides of the booth have had layers and layers of graffiti keyed into them, making one incomprehensible scratched-up mess.

It is freezing cold, and Eduardo can't feel his legs.

Underneath the thin fabric of his coat, his scars twinge painfully in warning, a beat before a howling wind comes tearing between the buildings. Eduardo hunkers further into the phone booth, free hand sliding under his shirt to touch the claw marks gouged over his ribs; they are the best souvenirs he's gotten from the monsters of New York City thusfar. He's fairly proud of them. They're useful indicators of barometric pressure, too, which is handy.

On the other end of the phone, Mark says, "Wardo, I have an idea."

"That it's probably detrimental to your health to forgo all mortal food in favor of work, until someone -- usually me -- has to force-feed a shot of nectar down your throat before you waste away?" Eduardo offers, droll.

"No, that -- wait, what. No. Wardo. Come on, I said I have an idea. It'll make things different for us, for our kind."

_Does this have anything to do with the way you and your younger brother are trying to find illicitly-born children of the Big Three?_ Eduardo wants to ask, but doesn't dare. He makes an inquisitive noises instead, which is really all Mark was looking for from him.

"It'll make us easier to find, easier to stay connected, so that it won't be so easy to just _lose_ half-bloods." Mark sighs, and says, quieter, almost like he didn't mean to say it at all, "I just want them to look at us differently."

"Mark," Eduardo says, voice becoming gentle. "You can't change human prejudices against the handicapped overnight."

"Sure I can," says Mark, and this time there isn't a shred of arrogance in his voice. The only thing Eduardo can hear is confidence.

❀❀❀

Their apartment came furnished with a landline, mounted on the wall next to the fridge. After the third time Christy accidentally severed the cord ("the second time wasn't my fault!" she protests fiercely. "It was a shitty manufactured guillotine anyway!"), they looked into getting a cordless phone, which put their nerves on high alert. Making a phone call probably shouldn't feel like diffusing a bomb, but there you go.

Thankfully, whatever horrible mojo that turns cell phones into a homing beacon for all hungry monsters doesn't seem to apply to the cordless kind.

"How's Christy?" Mark asks abruptly, with all the awkwardness of someone without a clear idea of how conversational timing goes, and then, muffled like maybe he's put his hand over the mouthpiece, "Dustin, catch Amy! She's about to sleep-walk into the pool again! Yes, no, fine, I know, but you're the one closest who isn't wired in!"

Amy Ritter, Eduardo's managed to piece together from the number of times she gets mentioned by Mark and Mark's assorted army of minions, is another find of Sean's. (Well, "find" being Sean's words. Personally, Eduardo thinks people tend to find Sean. Everyone's a little attracted to chaos, after all.) She's a second-generation half-blood; meaning, her parents were half-bloods who met at Camp, which made her a pretty spectacular find, since Eduardo's always assumed that half-bloods were a lot like mules and just couldn't reproduce with each other -- although they could reproduce with mortals, there's plenty of historical evidence for that. 

Amy can't see the monsters and the nightmare things, but she gets the vividly realistic dreams that heroes do and as such has a tendency to sleep-walk, which gets dangerous when she gets her hands on a sword.

_She's inbred,_ was Dustin's way of explaining it once, voice chirpy and teasing. _Her parents were in brother-cabins._

_French!_ a woman's voice protested loudly from the other end, presumably Amy. _Je suis francais!_

_Inbred,_ confirmed Dustin.

Eduardo brushes nail clippings into the sink and twists the taps to flush them down, putting the clippers back in the drawer, phone tucked underneath his chin.

"'How's Christy'?" he echoes with a sigh. "I never would have pegged Hephaestus kids as tortured artists. She _hammers_ in the middle of the night, Mark. Without ceasing! She makes lock picks for a living and is always trying them out on our front door, and she set a fire in a trash can. On my _bed."_

"Must be nice," Mark mutters, distracted. "Wait, your --" he cuts himself off.

"Yes, my," Eduardo goes, bemused for a beat. He unravels his sentence backwards, trying to find where Mark got tripped up. Amusement tickles along the insides of his ribs. "We don't share a bed, Mark," he says, unable to help laughing at the mental image. Christy's bed is covered in half-finished projects; trying to sleep with her would probably wind up like a live-action replay of Raiders of the Lost Arc.

"Oh," goes Mark, a flat, startled noise. "You and her --"

Eduardo takes pity on him. "We're not dating," he says firmly, because it's always best to put things into black and white for Mark. "We're roommates."

Mark's voice takes on that petulant tone he gets when he thinks he's been sorely wrong-footed. "I saw you, though. At the 4th of July --"

He chokes. " _Di immortales,_ Mark," he breathes. "Have you thought I've been dating Christy since I was _fifteen?_ No! No, no, no, we're friends. I mean, she likes sticking her tongue down people's throats, sure, but that's a perfectly healthy appetite to have."

Christy makes sure there's a very, very clear delineation between her belongings and his belongings, her responsibilities and his responsibilities, hers and his and _you better not be touching my things, Eduardo,_ as if by dividing their apartment in half, she can keep her heart as equally compartmentalized. That way, if something happens to Eduardo, it won't devastate her: she'll put everything pertaining to Eduardo in a neat box and it won't be messy and she'll be _fine._

Her sense of self-preservation has always felt a little business-like to him. He admires her for it, frankly. It's never been that easy for him.

Clearly having no idea what to do with this information and not wanting to admit it, Mark stays silent. 

Eduardo doesn't want him to hang up, so he pushes himself away from the bathroom sink, trailing barefoot into the front room, and launches into a funny anecdote about his job. Suspended from cables and balancing seventy stories above the ground is a breeze for Eduardo, who has no fear of heights and genuinely enjoys the kind of menial labor humans never want to do for themselves. It doesn't provoke his dyslexia and he gets to people-watch; all the men in suits and the women in pencil skirts and colorful shirts.

"-- and I don't know how they didn't manage to know I was there," there are shoes scattered by the door, easy to trip over in the dark. He bends down to straight then up. "But there was this one lady who was leaning against the window. Like, her butt was _right_ in front of my face, Mark, just pressed there. So I spritzed the window and wiped it down and _she didn't move._ For a moment, I was _literally_ wiping Madison Avenue's ass. I could not stop laughing for --"

"Do you remember Thalia?" Mark asks, so suddenly that the rest of Eduardo's story goes right out of his head.

He shifts the phone to his other ear. Cool air rushes over the flushed side of his face; there's a thin stream of air leaking in from the hallway, through the crack at the bottom of the door. "The daughter of Zeus, yeah," he nods, not bothering to point out that Mark wasn't even there for that.

"She wasn't the only one."

Eduardo closes his eyes and lets his head fall forward. 

"I know," he goes, like a confession.

❀❀❀

It's numbingly cold outside, so even though Eduardo's only out in the wind for maybe fifteen minutes, he fumbles at the combination lock for the mailbox with fingers that feel puffy, red-knuckled.

Footsteps go tramping up and down the stairs above his head. "Wardo Saverin, son of Hestia!" comes from the landing, loud enough to make him jump at its volume. He jerks his head up.

Christy leans out over the railing, ponytail swinging. She's laughing at him, of course, because she usually is.

"Christina Lee, daughter of Hephaestus," he returns in kind, dry, as she grabs hold of the railing and swings herself around the last bend. Her peacoat is belted at the waist, the collar turned up even though the heater's puffing right into the lobby. She's made up, beautiful and starkly sexual, with jeans that leave no mystery to the pure muscles of her thighs, the curve of her hips, and black boots that soar up almost to her knees, with a heel that feeds into the zipper going straight up the back, a steampunk pattern of gears and cogs.

She's going out, obviously -- working on her side project of finding a human to love who will live a long, long time, so she can live in them, too.

She plants her heels in the last step, hands on hips. "You talked to Mark today, didn't you?"

"And you are creepy," he answers. She makes an insulted face at him, but whatever, she knows. "How did you know?"

She flares her palms open in front of her face. "The sun came out from behind dark clouds!" And she drops her hands again. "No, seriously, it got really bright. This is the Northeast in the middle of winter, Wardo, come on, pull yourself together -- we aren't supposed to see that kind of sun until March."

"I don't control the weather, Christy," he feels the need to remind her. Bundling up their mail in one hand, he moves to go around her. "Have fun tonight, and don't go home with anybody I wouldn't."

She makes a dismissive noise, catching his arm and pressing a kiss to his cheek. He can smell the paint of her lipstick.

"Son of Hestia," she says again, close. "Home is wherever you are."

❀❀❀

Eduardo likes their upstairs neighbor, a small, mousey woman named Sally. She recently got married to this taciturn construction worker type, who comes off as kind of unfriendly upon introduction, but Eduardo assumes that Sally gets the side of him that they don't -- why would she marry him, otherwise?

He smiles at them when they pass each other in the stairwell, but Sally doesn't really come into their lives until the fall of 2000, when he's been living in the building for a month or two. Christy finds her standing out on the fire escape on the fourth floor landing with blood on her face, glinting darkly in her hair and sliding down her chin, and since she and Eduardo have more experience with first-aid than most Americans who aren't directly involved with the medical profession (although the building they live in seems like it almost _deters_ monsters, and they aren't sure why,) she coaxes Sally back to the apartment.

"It's nothing, it's nothing," Sally keeps saying, which in terms of the physical is true: head wounds bleed a lot, but this is just a tiny gash above one eyebrow, like something not very sharp had been catapulted at her face. It it not, however, _nothing._

She knows it, too, because she ducks her chin down like she's gathering strength and says so quietly Eduardo knows he isn't meant to pick up on it, "I don't want him to be someone I'm afraid of."

Christy sends him a meaningful look over the top of Sally's head, so he snaps to attention, doing what he does best; he fetches an afghan and the fuzziest, funniest warm sweater from the closet, and makes her a cup of hot chocolate that's more chocolate than milk, adding marshmellows shaped like stars. She smiles at him when he presses the mug into her hands, before turning back to Christy, who's regaling her with the story (edited for mortal ears) of the one year Mark tried to rank the Aphrodite girls based on a chess-playing algorithm, and in return, the Aphrodite girls duct-taped him to the flagpole, naked as the day he was born.

_I want it put down on record,_ Mark had muttered venomously, when Eduardo and Erica arrived to cut him down. _Chris is the prettiest Aphrodite girl._

"I honestly don't think he meant to hit me," Sally says, much later, and when she sets her shoulders, Eduardo sees, for one bright moment, nothing in her but backbone. "This time."

So, yeah, she's their friend after that.

("A friend! Who's mortal!" he says gleefully, all but hugging the pay phone in his excitement. "I've never had one of those before, it's so cool!"

"Oh, how the mighty have fallen," Divya says, dry as bone.)

About a week after that conversation about Zeus with Mark, Sally sells them her desktop computer, because her husband's going to use her Christmas bonus to buy them the newest operating system, whatever that is. The way she says it makes it sound like he's fishing for a status symbol.

She helps them set it up in the front room. Christy watches them position everything, a gleam in her eye like she's already imagining how she can soup it up, and Sally untangles cords and fills them in on what her son's been doing lately. He's eleven now, a problem child with abysmal test scores and an attention deficit disorder that makes school difficult for him. Eduardo and Christy exchange lingering, knowing looks over her head, and therefore miss the way Sally smiles at the ever-burning flame they keep burning in the window, like it's a familiar sight.

❀❀❀

In February of 2004, Mark Zuckerberg makes the college news circuit.

Christy hears about it from the guy who manages the sign-in sheet for the forge at the community college (college! Them! Take that, every first-grade teacher who looked at their test scores and clucked her tongue!) and she tells him about it on the subway, half-asleep on his shoulder, a box at her feet full of things to take to the kiln tomorrow morning to get glazed. "We need to look up Mark on the Internet when we get home," she mumbles.

"Oh?" he goes. He's done with his classes by five, but he likes accompanying Christy to the forge and watching her work. It's almost like Camp. "What's he done now?"

"Something cool, apparently."

Eduardo is capable of managing a simple Internet search, no matter how pleasantly surprised Christy acts ("oh, so you _do_ know how to work it!") and gets results pretty much immediately. Christy smacks his shoulder, hard, and jabs her fingers at one of the top results. The article that loads shows a photograph of Mark and Chris and a short-haired woman, standing together and squinting in bright California sunshine. The eye is immediately drawn to Chris, of course ("sons of Aphrodite," Christy snorts, but she's smiling) who looks impeccable in a suit, his hand on Mark's shoulder. The woman on Mark's other side is someone named Marilyn Delpy, according to the caption. It'll always be a little bizarre to Eduardo that, by now, Mark's social circle probably includes mostly people he _doesn't_ know.

Mark's fingernails have grown back, Eduardo notices. It's the first time he's seen Mark since the summer of his Quest.

"He founded his own business!" Chris exclaims, because she's actually reading the article. " _Di immortales,_ isn't he, like, twenty?"

The bolded caption under the picture says, **On his astronomical success with the college demographic, [Zuckerberg] says, "You have a lot less time than you think you do. We're too mortal to wait."**

And, further down, **Google exec Sergei Prakash says, "I don't know how the kid does it. I got a look at Zuck's code. It's Greek to me. No, I mean literally. It's in Greek."**

In the picture, Mark's not smiling -- not meanly, just uncomfortable. Underneath the worn-looking collar of his shirt, Eduardo can just make out his beaded Camp necklace, dark against the hollow of his throat.

He wonders, for a beat, where Mark got the money to start his own business. It's kind of a pointless question, though. He probably got the money the same way everybody does.

By working his ass off.

❀❀❀

He pushes his chair back from the desk, slowly.

"Mother?" he says out loud.

Calling a goddess who takes the form of a ten-year-old child "mother" is strange, but Hestia looks up from inspecting the spines of their books, her expression inquisitive. Their bookshelves are sparse, possessing mostly battered textbooks with "used" stamped on their spines, because Christy and Eduardo work too much to struggle with their reading outside of the basics. Instead, their bookshelves get used to house Christy's pieces; the occasional artesian bowl or pot she's done for class act as bookends. There are some others, though; steel-limbed, bright-eyed creatures that the Hephaestus and Hermes cabins collaborated on -- including one roomba-like thing that will play "Let's Get Down to Business" from Mulan when it thinks the apartment really needs to be cleaned. Dustin helped with that one.

"Do you know what Mark's prophecy was?"

Hestia swings around on her barstool, tucking her hands under her thighs, her feet swinging above the floor.

"I do," she confirms. "Would you like to know what part made him turn his back on you?"

Eduardo's heart misses a beat. That was ... direct. 

"I ..." he manages. "Can you tell me the whole thing?"

She smiles, like she was just waiting for him to ask. With her embers-and-firewood voice, she launches into poetic verse. Eduardo imagines what it would have been like, hearing it from the ghastly mummified Oracle at the age of fifteen in the attic of the Big House.

"That was a lot of fish metaphors," is all he can think to say when she finishes.

Hestia shows teeth, knowing.

❀❀❀

He's so busy _willing_ Mark to pick up that when the line actually connects, he's momentarily thrown and has no idea what to do.

"Mark?" he blurts out.

" _WARDO."_ Yeah, no. Dustin. Sounding ecstatic and overjoyed. "It is _Wardo!_ The most beautiful man I have ever laid eyes on! Your voice is music to my ears after these long, long years! The love of my --"

"Okay, Dustin," Eduardo interrupts, fondness swelling against his ribcage and stretching his scars. He suddenly misses Dustin so much it hurts -- he didn't get to say good-bye. He didn't get to say good-bye to any of them. "Is your boss around?"

"What, you mean the unwashed lump on the sofa? Yeah, Amy tried hosing him down earlier. He didn't take that very well," Dustin's voice is loud, warm, and very close to the mouthpiece. Eduardo wonders if he knows Mark's prophecy, the one he got from the Oracle all those years ago and is still trying to keep from coming true; what it said about the city, and what Hermes knows about Luke's fate. Luke is Dustin's brother, too, after all.

It was easier to unravel the important events going backwards than it probably had been for Mark, walking right into them and trying to shape them as they happened; shark week, the great white, the marlins and the trout, and the half-man never claimed. "Can you put him on?"

Before Dustin can answer, there's a scuffle, and then another voice, " _War_ do, long time no talk, buddy!"

Eduardo sighs. Speaking of shark week. "Sean."

Objectively, he knows his antagonism towards Sean is partly because Sean is a son of Eris and he will always rub people the wrong way, the same way you see a child of Ares and immediately want to pick a fight. It has very little to do with them personally. This is clearer to him now that he's older.

"I heard you got claimed! Good for you, brother. Pity it had to be some virgin goddess falling for your sob story."

"Athena's a virgin goddess and she has plenty of children. It's not outside the realm of possibility, Sean, can I please talk to Mark now? This is an international call."

" _Riiiiiiight._ I forget, sometimes. Not all of us are millionaires." 

Fortunately, with that parting quip (which Eduardo responds to with cheerful congratulations, because really, he's seen Facebook, it's amazing, and it will make it so much easier to keep connected with other half-bloods, so the money is _so_ not the important part,) Sean does actually fetch Mark.

"It's beyond my comprehension how you aren't even physically present and you can make Dustin bounce off the walls like that," Mark's voice sounds in his ear, lowly amused. "Although that might be genetic."

"Mark," says Eduardo. The name comes off his tongue like striking a match, a flare inside his chest. Outside his window, the winter clouds roil with all the appearance of a summer storm, strange and otherwordly. "The line from your prophecy. The half-man never claimed, with only one friend. He isn't me. It was never me. It's you."

❀❀❀

Because Mark is so focused on what he is _not._

Just half a human. Only half a god. Not as smart as regular kids, not patient enough, not a good enough friend, not good enough. He is half-human, half-blood, half-god, half-golden ichor. Half-friend, half-traitor, half-trickster. Half-son, half-brother. Half-Castellan, half something of his own devising. Half a man, always forgotten by his mother, born at the same time as Dustin and put aside by his father in lieu of Hermes's guilt over Luke's unavoidable destiny.

In trying to stop the Oracle's words from coming true, Mark became exactly what he was frightened he already was.

And to think, Eduardo almost ignored this.

So he says, _I claim you._

So he says, _You are my best friend._

So he says, _Mark Zuckerberg, best friend of Eduardo Saverin._

So Mark says, _Wardo,_ with a note in his voice that makes Eduardo think there's a puzzled furrow to his brow, that uncertain tic it gets when he doesn't know what to do.

_I just thought that someone should tell you._

❀❀❀

It is the summer of 2004.

Eduardo is twenty-two years old.

He stands outside the entrance to the subway. Petrified gum makes a grey, cemented mass in the pay phone's coin return. On the other side of the booth, foot traffic moves around him in waves: men in suits, in tattered jeans, in hair all the colors of the rainbow, in enough piercings to set off all metal detectors in a mile radius; women in pencil skirts, in tattered jeans, in dreadlocks with the tips dipped in color, in hijabs the same sunflower yellow that Christy's scarf had been when it was new (she burned it, ritual-style, and clinked beer bottles with Eduardo afterwards, satisfied.)

Any one of them could be a half-blood, he supposes.

Any one of them could be the mortal parent of a half-blood. Sometimes he wonders if that's a worse fate.

Sally from the upstairs apartment and her son have gone missing. They took a drive and never came back.

On the other end of the line, a microwave beeps, and then Mark hisses out a breath between his teeth, which Eduardo takes to mean whatever he was microwaving exploded, and then tells him, "You should come to California."

"Yeah?" goes Eduardo. He wonders if he should tell Mark what Christy told him, the news that Hermes had shown up at Camp on one of his infrequent visits to his children and mentioned Mark by name, like he actually knew who he was, what with being the new patron god of the Internet and all. The Stoll twins, Christy also heard via her little brother Charlie, apparently consider it a great source of pride that Mark Zuckerberg is their big brother.

But if he does, it might make it that much more obvious that he isn't bringing up Luke.

"But your father --" Mark starts, and Eduardo cuts him off, sharp.

"It doesn't matter." He squeezes his eyes shut. "Hestia is my mother. You and Dustin and Chris and Christy are my brothers, my cousins, my family. Whatever else ... just doesn't matter," and he remembers a time, years and years ago, sitting around a campfire with Mark working at his elbow, saying, _it doesn't matter, you belong with us in Hermes anyway._ "You know that."

"I know that," Mark agrees, solemn, and he wonders if Mark's thinking of the way Eduardo said, _I claim you._ "I still think you should come out. Now, while ..." he trails off. _While you still can,_ is the unsaid.

News travels fast, then.

He looks up at the sky. The clouds have been hovering around the Empire State Building for days, as dark and ominous as shadows. Every breath he draws into his lungs tastes like lightning. He thinks of summer nights, hammock creaking softly above his head and the window open to the moon, the smell of burning lamp oil and Mark, breathing so close it's like his air was Eduardo's, too.

Mark speaks again, quieter now. "We'll keep the hearth lit for you," he promises. Home is where the hearth is.

And a storm is coming.

"Mark," says Eduardo. "Zeus's lightning bolt has gone missing from Olympus."

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
